Cooperative Behavior

Cooperative Driving

Cooperative driving is the joint predictive avoidance of potentially hazardous situations by commutative actions between the vehicle and the driver as well as the vehicle and the environment.
A concrete instance are “Car Gestures”. Imagine the car predicts a potentially hazardous situation and communicates this by indicating a de-escalating trajectory with a gentle steering wheel impulse, a Car Gesture. The gesture should be clearly noticable for the driver but will by itself not be sufficient for avoiding the hazard. In this way, the driver is informed early with a beneficial behavior bias. Since it is a recommendation based on prediction, the driver still has the full spectrum of choices to either follow this recommendation, initiate an even less hazardous trajectory or to reject the recommendation and stay on the chosen trajectory for a reason unknown to the vehicle. A scientific user study has shown that people can accept Car Gestures due to their non-invasiveness and their action proposing nature.

Cooperative Behavior

Behavior generation is the process for answering the question what a system should do.
In Cooperative Behavior generation the system does not follow a goal on its own but together with a human partner. On the one hand, the partner is just another part of the environment, on the other hand, the relation between system and partner is special. They share a common goal and their behavioral strategies have to be aligned in order to be successful. Thus communication as part of a possible action plays a much more central role together with predicting and understanding the intention of the partner.

At HRI-EU we focus on cooperative behavior generation in vehicles and robots. For vehicles, the challenge is to guide the driver pro-actively without supervision. The goal is to raise and not to replace the driver. Cooperative vehicles maximize the joy together with the driver and other traffic participants. In robotics, the physical component of achieving something together is much stronger. Manipulating objects jointly by the robot and its human partner should generate primarily a feeling of accomplishment that is central to cooperative robotics.